LAHORE, March 13: The 1973 Constitution is completely silent on the selection of the opposition leader, who has still not been nominated three months after the inaugural session of the sitting Parliament.

Constitutional experts say the selection of opposition leaders is a convention that is not governed by the 1973 Constitution, unlike selection of the leader of the house, the National Assembly speaker and deputy speaker and the Senate chairman and deputy chairman. They further pointed out that even the speaker could not take notice of the delay in selection of opposition leader or issue any direction to the opposition in this regard

LFO’s National Security Council would remain incomplete without the opposition leader, who has been named as one of its members. However, the opposition parties are functioning in parliament through their respective parliamentary leaders, having failed to evolve a consensus on the opposition leader.

Talking to Dawn, Supreme Court Bar Association president Hamid Khan proposed that in view of a marked difference of opinion in the current parliament, the opposition leader should be chosen from one party while the member of another leading party should be named as representative of the opposition in the Senate. Though the 1973 Constitution is silent on the selection of opposition leader, the opposition parties have to find a way out for effective working of the Parliament, he said.

Former Punjab advocate-general and Sharif family counsel Ashtar Ausaf Ali called for a two-party system in parliament, saying such a mechanism would not give rise to complications like delayed selection of opposition leader. According to him, the candidate obtaining the second-highest number of votes in the election for prime minister would have become opposition leader in a two-party system.

However, the multi-party coalition in the current set-up necessitates selection of opposition leader at the earliest, he said. He attributed the delay in the selection of opposition leader to the “lack of moral courage in the opposition parties to accept a non-party member as their parliamentary representative”.

Former law minister S.M. Masood said the majority party in the opposition had the right to nominate the opposition leader and formally inform the speaker in this regard. “I do not see any constitutional lacuna being created by the delay in opposition leader’s nomination. The delay would not impede the working of parliament,” he said. He termed the selection of opposition leader more of a parliamentary tradition than a constitutional requirement.